Coming Home: Victor Ekpuk

Arthouse-The Space presents Coming Home, the first major solo exhibition of Victor Ekpuk’s work in Nigeria in over a decade. After a four month residency with the Arthouse Foundation in 2015, this exhibition features his newest project using the city of Lagos as inspiration. In a departure from his normative practice, Ekpuk’s works in the exhibition experiment with three-dimensional forms, adopting the human head as a symbol for the physical and psychological experiences of daily life in Lagos.

Victor Ekpuk is a Nigerian-born artist based in Washington, DC. Ekpuk came to prominence through his paintings and drawings which reflect indigenous African philosophies of the Nsibidi and uli art forms. Ekpuk reimagines graphic symbols from diverse cultures to form a personal style of mark making that results in the interplay of art and writing. His work frequently explores the human condition in society, drawing upon a wide spectrum of meaning that is rooted in African and global contemporary art discourses.

Victor Ekpuk obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria in 1989. He developed a minimalist approach of reducing form to constituent lines, a technique he explored while working as a cartoonist for Daily Times, a leading Nigerian newspaper, in the 1990s. His work has been exhibited in acclaimed international venues including the Krannert Art Museum (Illinois), the Fowler Museum (California), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), the Newark Museum (New Jersey), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Dakar Biennale (Senegal) and the Johannesburg Biennial (South Africa). Most recently, Ekpuk was featured in exhibitions at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College and the 12th Havana Biennale in Cuba. His works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, Newark Museum, The World Bank, Hood Museum, Krannert Art Museum, United States Art in Embassies Art Collection and the Fidelity Investment Art Collection.